Here’s a synopsis of an interesting article by Mike Emerson, CMO at Aprimo, From Customer Relationships to Customer Engagement:
The late 1990s brought the advent of customer relationship management (CRM). CRM offered the promise of huge increases in loyalty and customer profitability based on the delivery of continuous value to customers. Like real-world relationships, these technology driven conversations were truly two-way dialogues, replacing the one-way messaging that was delivering diminished success.
While CRM advanced the state of marketing from a monolog to a dialogue, it was still a conversation that was driven by the company, not the customer. Increasingly, customers have come to take control of this situation and not only participate in conversations with brands, but control that interaction as well.
Marketing in 2008 and beyond must evolve an approach from one of executing on a relationship plan to creating and maintaining engagement with our customers. This change is every bit as fundamental as the move from mass marketing to CRM during the 1990s.
Brian Haven, a research analyst at Forrester Research, interviewed a variety of leading brands such as Nike and Procter & Gamble to identify the basic elements of customer engagement. He defined four key elements to be present for customer engagement to work: involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence. Traditional CRM strategies have largely focused on the first two elements. We use a variety of acquisition techniques to get prospects to come to our website or call our sales personnel, but in order to tackle the last two elements, we need to shift the model. While leading companies such as Nike are in a position to spend millions of dollars to embrace this new paradigm, the promise of customer engagement is too great for any of us to ignore.
Here are some thoughts on how to benefit from this paradigm:
1. Begin to utilize Web 2.0 technologies to create spaces where customers can be a part of the experience. Blogs, communities, and customer generated content have moved from the early adopter to the mainstream.
2. Utilize a role-based marketing approach. By designing marketing programs that appeal to individuals in specific roles, we dramatically increase engagement with your audience.
3. Measure multi-channel customer behavior for “quantifiable listening.†Define a marketing performance management (MPM) strategy drives your ability to understand how customers are engaging with your brand and delivery channels in order to respond and react accordingly.
4. Foster customer satisfaction and loyalty. Engagement can only happen in an environment where expectations are being met by your company.
More than anything else, customer engagement requires a new way of thinking about our customer relationships. The technology and best practices already exist for you to attract customer attention and communicate your key messages. We in marketing have a tremendous opportunity to lead efforts to leverage customer engagement.
